Anchorage (Alaska), Sept. 19 : Sarah Palin wasn’t the only target of an online hacker.

Law enforcement officials are claiming that her family and staff were also compromised.

Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said on Thursday that the FBI and Secret Service have launched a formal investigation into the hacking of one of Palin’s Yahoo E-mail accounts.

Yahoo declined to comment Thursday on the details of the investigation, citing Palin’s privacy and the sensitivity of such investigations, Fox News reports.

A preliminary probe reveals that the hacker used Ctunnel. com, an Internet proxy site, which renders Web users anonymous, to get into Palin’s e-mail.

Gabriel Ramuglia, a web developer from Athens, Georgia, runs the site. He said the hacker left behind revealing clues after posting screen grabs of Palin’s inbox.

Ramuglia said he saw the screenshots and recognized his site. He is now working with the FBI to provide agents with his business logs to help identify the criminal.

Ramuglia said the FBI told him they also reached out to Yahoo to ask for help. The hope is that information from Yahoo could be matched with something in the proxy site’s logs, identifying the hacker.

The logs from both Ctunnel. com and Yahoo! should be delivered to the FBI by Friday, Ramuglia said.

Meanwhile, Jose Nazario, a senior security engineer with Arbor Networks Inc., said he knows “through personal contacts” that members of the group Anonymous were involved in the Palin e-mail attack.

He said Anonymous is a loose network of a few dozen people who live in the United States and abroad and range from teenagers to 30-year-olds who share what he said is a “sociopathic sense of humor.”

“Anonymous sort of takes pride in doing this publicly and pissing people off. There are other groups that do this, but they aren’t as public about it,” Nazario said. (ANI)